Five Things To Know On CrowdStrike’s New Exposure Management Launch

The cybersecurity giant is debuting Network Vulnerability Assessment capabilities for its fast-growing Falcon Exposure Management offering.

CrowdStrike announced Monday it’s debuting crucial new capabilities for exposure management, which bring improved visibility and prioritization around vulnerabilities impacting network devices.

The cybersecurity giant’s update brings a new Network Vulnerability Assessment tool to the company’s Falcon Exposure Management offering, which has recently been among the fastest-growing segments of the CrowdStrike Falcon platform, according to company executives.

CrowdStrike announced the product expansion in connection with its Americas Partner Symposium, which is taking place this week in Park City, Utah.

What follows are five things to know on CrowdStrike’s new exposure management launch.

‘Full Feature Set’

As CrowdStrike moves to establish itself as a top player the critical exposure management space, the new update announced Monday should make the company’s offering more relevant to a wider set of partners and customers, CrowdStrike Chief Business Officer Daniel Bernard said in an interview with CRN.

The addition of capabilities for assessing network device vulnerabilities brings a key missing piece to CrowdStrike’s offering and makes the vendor a more formidable competitor in vulnerability management, according to Bernard.

“That is one of the last big things [for CrowdStrike] to be able to replace the full feature set of the legacy vulnerability management products,” he said. “That gives us the feature parity to go in and replace these legacy products.”

Enhanced Visibility

The new Network Vulnerability Assessment capabilities — which are generally available as of Monday — are aimed at enabling rapid identification and remediation of network vulnerabilities, according to CrowdStrike. This includes vulnerabilities affecting network devices such as routers and switches as well as firewalls.

Key advantages of the new tool include improved visibility into network risks through continuous and real-time assessments of assets on the network, CrowdStrike said.

The technology ultimately allows security teams to overcome their network blind spots that “outdated” scanning tools may suffer from, according to the company.

Improved Prioritization

Meanwhile, in terms of prioritization, Network Vulnerability Assessment utilizes AI-powered techniques to identify which risks to network devices to focus on first, CrowdStrike said.

For instance, Falcon Exposure Management’s patented ExPRT.AI technology is capable of identifying the 5 percent of vulnerabilities that are responsible for the vast majority — 95 percent — of the risk from vulnerabilities, according to the company.

Prioritization decisions are determined through analysis of actual threat actor activity along with “real-world” attack paths used by adversaries, CrowdStrike said.

Accelerating Consolidation

Alongside the direct enhancements to security, CrowdStrike is also positioning the launch of new Network Vulnerability Assessment capabilities as a further driver of platform consolidation.

For partners and customers, “it’s all native in the platform. They don't have to deploy new agent — and they can remove an agent — and get vulnerability management and attack surface management,” Bernard told CRN.

This provides an “inside view and an outside view — synthesized together in their [Security Operations Center],” he said. “It’s just the easiest consolidation opportunity.”

Fast-Growing Business

Earlier this month, CrowdStrike for the first time provided financial details on the size of its exposure management business — with CrowdStrike Co-founder and CEO George Kurtz disclosing during the company’s quarterly call that the offering “has swiftly become a meaningful contributor to the business with line of sight to $300 million in [annual recurring revenue].”

The exposure management offering provides “both native vulnerability management for devices and applications, coupled with integrated attack surface management,” Kurtz said during the call with analysts. “Our customers are already replacing legacy vulnerability management products at scale.”